


Cracked Mask

by Metronomeblue



Series: 1915 [3]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - World War I, Betrayal, F/M, False Soulmarks, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, We finally start to get to a real plot, World War I, false soulmates, tsukishima is a dick, w h o o p s maybe you should've mentioned that earlier Ichigo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 10:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14567046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: Orihime misses a lot of hints. Ichigo misses more. Tsukishima changes everything.





	Cracked Mask

**Author's Note:**

> It's only been a THOUSAND YEARS but this is finally going up.  
> Also.... I am not a historian... I beg you to forgive any errors I make. I'm doing my best.

They discussed the Marks in second grade. That was the first time, anyway. That was when many children began to understand that the soft forms on their skin were individual, private, sacred. Some had to be told, through their tears, that their marks were probably intangible, a scent or a sound or a feeling, maybe even a taste. It didn’t soothe all of them, in fact many continued crying for fear that they might never experience their mark, or recognize it, even if they did. Orihime hadn’t gotten hers yet, or if she had she hadn’t seen. 

* * *

 

They would come later, blood-red petals that floated gently over her skin, traveling like light through water, making shivering patterns on her arms and neck and face. Always in motion, never settling. At first there was one, like a lone fish lost without its school. Then four, then ten. All varying sizes, all soft and wavering on her wrists and neck, her cheeks and her shoulders. It changed, not long after. The petals swayed and circled, and grouped into wavering shapes. She watched, day after day, as shimmering gold bloomed among them, like the pollen-soft centers of red flowers. They kept moving, gentle and uncontained, a private garden.

When she moved to Karakura, she met Ichigo. She met Tatsuki, and Mizuiro and Keigo, too, but Ichigo had caught her attention before anyone else. He was small, then, and he wore long sleeves all the time. Never showed any more skin than he had to. The first time she’d ever seen his marks was when he’d fallen from a tree in seventh grade. He’d hit the ground hard, and they thought he might have broken a bone. Orihime had stood, wide-eyed and breathless at the sight of his skin. Ichigo had tears of blue up his arms, like something had clawed through. Raw, torn edges painted onto his muscles, his palms, his fingers and shoulders. Every now and then she’d see a flash of gold, a snatch of copper, but for the most part they were long stripes, almost like scars.

She never saw them again.

They became friends, after a time, and when he met Sado, she became friends with him, too. It wasn’t hard at all, to be their friend. Something felt right, when they were together. Something about their friendship made her feel freer, made her heart lighter and the flowers on her skin dance. Sado was quiet, but warm, a calm, gentle presence that stood apart until they invited him in. Ichigo was unfathomable, something in him closed-off and serious beneath the layers of studiousness and reckless energy. But together. Together, the three of them felt right. Orihime could be quieter, could fill the silence without a voice, Sado could speak lowly, without feeling like too much, Ichigo could laugh, a low huff of rusty happiness and a sigh of relief.

She could almost convince herself that this was how things were supposed to be. That this was how it could always be. She could hardly keep her marks locked away, but neither Ichigo nor Sado had ever asked her to try, which was more than most people could say. Ichigo, too, seemed to forget how long his sleeves were, how much of him was weighed down. Sado never hid the marks on his arms, the soft blue like six-pointed stars, like delicate snowflakes or flowers, the red like fluttering petals. They were all mixed up, like confetti or fireworks, swirling up and down his skin, resting on the lines of his muscles. Sometimes, she could almost convince herself that the colors matched her own, Ichigo’s.

But that was a dream.

The war came fast, a swell of whispers, a tide of news that crashed down on them all just as they grew old enough to care. Ichigo left school early that year, and Orihime joined the growing number of women learning to care for the wounded. They agreed to serve their country as best they could, each of them trembling in the saying of it and unfaltering in the sentiment. Sado, hands steady, had agreed too, and even now Orihime is forced to wonder if it was for their country or for them that he agreed to fight. She doesn’t know how to phrase it in a letter, so she doesn’t ask. August had brought change in more than the leaves.

January brought hell.

Sado and Ichigo were both sent away, places Orihime wasn’t cleared to know about, doing things she sat up awake at night thinking about. She wondered if she was alone in that. Momo got up every other night to open the back door and do… something. Orihime wondered if it was a superstition. If it was a charm. If she should be doing it too. Here on the edge of the front, they got all kinds of things she’d like to charm away or ward off. Land mines, bone saws, that angry Captain crying, the scent of blood, the burning in her chest like a breath trapped too long. She had so much want, and so little power here.

Here, on the edge of the world.

Orihime wasn’t expecting to see either of them for a good long time, but as January faded into February, as the snow began to slush and the strange, European trees began to scent the air with leaf rot and new growth, see them she did. They were stood in the courtyard- more like a clearing, but Isane said ‘courtyard’ sounded nicer. Ichigo, covered from neck to wrist, Sado, hair cut and knuckles bandaged, both of them looking like soldiers, real soldiers. Tired, lost. But here.

“Sado! Kurosaki!”

Inoue came barreling in like a bullet, smacked into Chad- or she would have, if he hadn’t caught her in time. Ichigo couldn’t stop the half-smile from spreading, try as he might. It felt nice, to have the three of them back together, to have his closest friends back in arm’s reach. Felt like home, like the soft settle of something he hadn’t known was out of place.

He hadn’t felt such a divide, a before and after of emotion, since the day his mother died. Since the day her blood had dripped down his arms, since he’d felt the warmth leave her body, the rain paint his face clear and pale.

His marks had shattered, warped irrevocably the day his mother died. The soft blue had fragmented, bled like ink into sharp, clawed stripes down his arms, the gold had dissipated, nothing but glimmering smoke. Uryu’s white-blue glow faded to the edges of the slashes, faint and lost easily in the day. The doctors had called them a sign of his own mental deficiency, a mark of deviancy or an unsound mind. He’d kept them covered, after that. Sometimes, looking at the flutter of gold like shimmer of pollen on Inoue’s cheeks, or the furl of blue on Chad’s shoulders, Ichigo fancied they matched, that the red they both bore was his own.

He wasn’t foolish enough to say it, though. Never cruel enough to suggest such a dream. But sometimes, watching them, feeling the three of them together, he wished for it.

“Who’s this?” Tsukishima’s soft voice rises up behind him, startling Inoue, and Ichigo holds back a shiver. Shukuro was too quiet to be careless around, too soft-spoken and restrained to not be hiding something.  Inoue’s smile falls, just a touch, and Chad lets her down.

“Inoue, Shukuro Tsukishima. Tsukishima, Orihime Inoue.” Ichigo forces a smile down at seeing them again, and  sticks a thumb at Tsukishima. “He’s stuck with us until we get back to where we’re supposed to be.”

“A pleasure,” he says smoothly, and Inoue’s wariness melts away when she takes his hand.

“The pleasure is mine,” she says formally, but her face is filled with familiarity. The way her hand clings to his before pulling away sticks uncomfortably in Ichigo’s chest.

Tsukishima pulls off his gloves, and both Inoue and Chad show him in side, the three of them talking like old friends. Ichigo feels… not left behind. But forgotten, perhaps. Excluded.

That continues for a week. The whole time it’s as if they try to regain what they had, but Tsukishima is always so new that they have to induct him, explain, and Ichigo somehow ends up on the edges. Always ends up left out, left behind. It would bother him more if he had any worry that Tsukishima could truly fit in his place. The man isn’t anything like Ichigo. He’s a guest. He isn’t a piece of the whole.

Until he is.

Until Inoue comes running, and Chad and Tsukishima not far behind her, and she hugs Ichigo, breathless and wild, and Ichigo realizes with a sinking heart that he’s never seen Tsukishima with his gloves off, with his sleeves rolled up. But Inoue catches his attention first, thrilled and bright.

“He’s our soulmate! Both of ours!” And she’s laughing, she’s in tears she’s so happy, and if there is a spark of sorrow in her eyes, he ignores it and tries to be happy for her. Chad looks over to him, face relaxed, for once so at peace, so uncomplicatedly happy, that Ichigo feels a tug at his own heart, sick and pained but earnest. Tsukishima looks right, in a way, standing there spindly and cold to match their warmth.

“I’m happy for you,” he says, and by some miracle his voice doesn’t sound broken. He’d known, he thinks. He’d always known. Even if he wasn’t between them, they’d be together. Something had felt right about that, balanced like they were hand-in-hand. He was the wrong one. The two of them are talking, going in to get Inoue’s coat, leaving him alone with Tsukishima.

“I feel bad,” Tsukishima says, and his voice is amused, not joyful, not soft with wonder. It’s triumphant, something about it wrong. “Taking them from you like this. They were yours first, after all.” His smile is ugly, and Ichigo can’t quite account for the sudden impulse to hit him, to drive his knuckles hard into Tsukishima’s face, to break his nose, crack his cheekbone, watch the blood spill from his skin, erase that ugly fucking smile-

“They’re my friends,” he says amiably, rage sitting a feather’s breadth beneath the surface. “I’m happy that they’re happy.” He can see Tsukishima’s hand reaching out for a handshake, lifts his hand to do the same, ready to pretend friendship for his true friends’ sake. They don’t look away from each other, Tsukishima’s glittering black eyes stuck to Ichigo’s amber, fire and ice, fury and apathy.

“You’re a good man,” he says finally, and Ichigo looks down to see the marks on his arm.

The urge to murder him comes back full-force.

Twining up Tsukishima’s arm are Ichigo’s marks. The way they were, unchanged. Soft blue flowers, glimmering gold, flashes of pale, ice-white lightning like Uryu’s very soul. They drift and spark and float, and Ichigo is caught between motionless horror and blinding rage. _How_ , his mind screams, agonized, replaced, supplanted without knowing it. _How could he do that_. Ichigo couldn’t set his _own_ marks to rights. Had he stolen them? Or had Ichigo’s soul been so damaged, so utterly destroyed by that day that Tsukishima had been chosen to take his place? Was Ichigo so unfit? Inoue, Chad, were their souls so severed from his own?

_Did they know?_

“How,” he breathes, the only word that manages to make its way from his lips. “Those are-”

“I suppose they must look familiar,” Tsukishima says, in a tone that’s half-sincerity half-boredom. “I recognized the bond the moment I saw it. They’re your soulmates. Only they can’t be yours, because they’re mine. You can’t possibly have replaced me, with a soul as broken as yours. You were a placeholder, Kurosaki. You were a pale imitation.” His eyes are bottomless, boring into Ichigo’s own, his hand as cold as ice, his grip as firm. “Your job is done.” Ichigo feels himself sway, feels the cold stab of certainty in his heart. “Thank you for your service.”

He cannot look away, cannot tear his eyes from Tsukishima’s, cold and deep and sharp as any blade. He cannot look away. He cannot move his hand. He cannot-

“Ichigo?” Chad’s voice is even, if worried, and Inoue is beside him, concerned. Suddenly, Ichigo’s hand slips free, his head turns.

“I’m alright,” he reassures them, with a weak half-smile. He hopes they believe it.

He wishes he could.


End file.
